Given poetry’s basis in rhythm, it perhaps isn’t surprising how much walking has inspired poetry over the centuries. And vice versa.
At the Guardian, Billy Mills explores some great examples of such inspirational poems in his post “Walking”. “This week’s exercise is a partly physical one, to get our metrical feet moving.”
If trains provide an insistent, regular rhythm and a sense of moving at speed through space and time, then surely the poetry of walking must be slower, more leisurely and somehow grounded by the physical contact of foot on earth and the effort and relief provided by incline and decline.
While you should certainly go read Mills’ article, and maybe even participate in his challenge to
take your pen, pencil or keyboard for a stroll. What does walking mean to you? Is it a way to commune with nature or merely an unavoidable nuisance, best left to others if at all possible? Your poems are required; please walk this way.
if you feel like it, here are some of the poems he linked to:
- “Walking” by Thomas Traherne
- “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman
- “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot
- “Provinvia Deserta” by Ezra Pound
- “The Wood-pile” by Robert Frost
- “Kore” by Robert Creeley
As for me, no discussion of walking poems can go by without mentioning Tolkien’s “The Road Goes Ever On”:
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.